Community Wealth Blog

Our executive director Ted Howard outlined the Anchor Dashboard project for Baltimore's WYPR (listen to the conversation here), spoke to Next City about how comprehensive metrics help produce anchor-led economic development that doesn't result in the unintended effects of gentrification and displacement.

Five years after the financial crisis economic inequality in the United States is spiraling to levels not seen since the Gilded Age. While most Americans are experiencing a recovery-less recovery, the top one per cent of earners last year claimed 19.3 per cent of household income, their largest share since 1928. Moreover, income distribution looks positively egalitarian when compared to wealth ownership.

Universities, hospitals and other “anchor institutions” wield considerable economic power in a community. The numbers are widely available, but astonishing nonetheless. Combined, hospitals and universities are responsible for more than $1 trillion of our nation’s $15 trillion economy.

Public banks and credit unions weathered the last crisis much better than private banks, benefiting the communities they served as well. And many experts believe that it’s only a matter of time before the next financial crisis hits. To weather the next one well, we need to ensure that our individual and collective resources strengthen the types of financial institutions that are democratically accountable, economically stable, mission oriented, and that are actively helping build and keep wealth locally in our communities.

Last month, PBS NewsHour’s Business Desk featured an essay by Chris Mackin with the consulting group Ownership Associates entitled “The Alternative American Dream: Inclusive Capitalism.” Mackin uses the term “inclusive capitalism” as an ownership sharing proposition – one that is about creating a new relationship between employees and their workplace based not on a “sense” of ownership but on actual, tangible ownership.

This week, The Democracy Collaborative is releasing a new paper to create a framework for measuring the effectiveness of university and hospital efforts to partner with and improve conditions in surrounding communities. Our goal is to help institutions reflect and assess broadly the long-term impact of their anchor-mission activities, and particularly the extent to which they may benefit low-income children, families and communities.

Green. Local. Not-for-profit. That’s the goal in Boulder, Colorado where grassroots activists and the local nonprofit New Era Colorado Foundation have been campaigning to turn the city’s private power source into a public utility in order to more aggressively pursue renewable energy options and reduce carbon emissions.

Reporting to the CEO and a member of the senior management team, the Chief Operating Officer (COO) is a newly created position that will allow the CEO to focus more externally on fundraising, advocating nationally for the CWB paradigm of economic development, building key stakeholder and strategic partnerships, and strategizing about “what comes next”.

The Democracy Collaborative – working in close collaboration with Jill Bamburg of the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and Marjorie Kelley of the Tellus Institute, and supported by the Northwest Area Foundation – is spearheading a year long intensive training and advisory program designed to help Native communities better engage in comprehensive community economic development.

Many of the benefits of employee ownership are quite apparent. Through owning a portion of stock in her or his company through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, an employee is part owner and receives not just income, but has the opportunity to build wealth that would otherwise be unavailable in a traditional workplace.

We are pleased to announce a new intern position at The Democracy Collaborative that will focus on the Community-Wealth.org newsletter and adding web content. For further details, please see the position description below. Remember to submit your applications by August 30!